The insurance industry has implemented several methods to evaluate insurance claims. The evaluation process is often initiated by a “first notice of loss.” This generally occurs after a loss has occurred and an insurer is notified of an occurrence that resulted in, for example, damage to a property. Insurers can be notified from various parties, such as, policy holders, police departments or fire departments. Often, a policyholder will then make a claim against an insurance policy due to the alleged loss. Typically, a file will be created and assigned to an insurance representative who will engage in an analytical process to determine if the insured is covered for the type of loss that has occurred and, if so, assess the monetary cost of the damage.
Insurers are often concerned with determining the cause of a loss. The analytical process involved when doing so, is often based on information gathered after an occurrence. This poses a serious problem because of the difficulties associated with assessing how the loss actually occurred. Photographs taken after an occurrence are often used by insurance representatives to make determinations on the cause of loss, for example, associated with a damaged property. However, there are several drawbacks to the use of photographs after a loss has already occurred.
One drawback is that an insurance representative is often required to conduct an on-site visit to the location of the damage, which can be costly and ineffective. When the insurance representative physically goes to the property, each visit can be costly to an insurer. In addition, an insurance representative's use of photographs after-the-fact is often too late to make an accurate determination of what actually caused the loss.
One of the most significant drawbacks of the typical claim evaluation methods used by insurers is that they are backward looking They fail to assess potentially high risk activities policyholders routinely engage in before the loss occurs. While photographs may be helpful to view a damaged property, they fail to provide policyholders with a way to become more aware of their high risk behavior and either alter their behavior or obtain adequate insurance that will potentially cover a claim made due to their behavior.
Accordingly, there is a need for a system and process that compiles and assesses crowd sourced data, such as photographs, that aids in pre-emptively starting the “first notice of loss” process and potentially even preventing such a loss through advance loss control measures.